Nov 07, 2015

No sooner had I flagged a laughable piece of product placement in an apparent news article on the Daily Mail's website than somebody flagged this clumsy effort from music title the NME last week which was supposed to be about the 10 best debut albums of the year:

"In the second of four blog posts that look back over an incredible year in music, we hone in on the debut albums that have set our pulses racing. With so many album reviews on NME.com, we armed ourselves with Windows 10 on the lightning-fast Surface Pro 3 tablet, a device Microsoft promise can replace your laptop."

It went on...

"Thanks to a neat feature on the new Windows web browser Edge, we snapped multiple web pages..."

And on...

"...we streamed via... the Windows 10 digital streaming service with an online music catalogue of over 38 million tracks. Hefty."

And on...

"In less than five minutes we'd bought tickets and used digital assistant Cortana to email our gig buddy, add the date to our calendar and set a reminder...so even if we're out and about the reminder will pop up on our phone. Nice one."

Nice one. Now can Cortana also pass me a bucket, because I think I'm about to be sick.

Of course brands want publicity and publications need to make money. Neither of those things are wrong, but it is the ham-fisted way some publications are going about it that should serve as a warning to everybody.

Microsoft should be embarrassed they paid anything for something so witless and the NME should hang their heads in shame at publishing something so cringe-worthy because this kind of puff-piece lets down readers and advertisers alike.

Producing "sponsored content" mustn't be taken as a licence to insult the intelligence of readers or do a half-arsed job on behalf of advertisers, otherwise both will be lost.

Nov 14, 2014

Jargon, gibberish, twaddle: Whatever you call it there's too much in PR, marketing and the media.

I was recently speaking with a PR person who represented a large shopping centre.

"We never refer to it as a shopping centre," I was told.

"Really? What do you call it?" I asked.

"A retail and leisure destination."

"But what does everybody else call it?"

"A shopping centre."

It's hard to imagine somebody stopping you in the street and asking if there is a "retail and leisure destination" nearby. It's a small example but it neatly illustrates how people employed to communicate are prone to a counter-intuitive use of language that often introduces the potential for confusion and misunderstanding.

Last week, I read news reports that supermarket chain Morrison's is "up-streaming" its "invisible manufacturing". And who can forget when Burberry "exited doors not aligned with brand status and invested in presentation through both enhanced assortments and dedicated, customised real estate in key doors". Or how about when HSBC "demised" nearly 1,000 jobs.

I also recently read about an "immersive cheese pop-up" in Shoreditch (of course). It was apparently "a 360 degree cheese experience like no other" - or a "shop" as our forebears may quite adequately have said, to the easy comprehension of anybody listening.

A quote attributed to Albert Einstein goes something along the lines of "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough".

It's a sentiment that everybody who works in and around the media, advertising, marketing and PR would do well to take note of because jargon has become the norm to such an extent that even when telling people not to use jargon some people are still using it.

At a recent PR event one speaker told delegates, seemingly without irony, "you can't talk in jargon and wonder why you don't get cut-through".

The Guardian has today published a list of jargon words and phrases that the PR industry is particularly guilty of overusing. "Cut-through" doesn't make the list, but synergy, groundbreaking and leverage are all on there. (John Rentoul's 'banned list' also offers a worthy collection of cliches and jargon words which should be avoided.)

Of course the creeping onset of such jargon has been coming for a while. Those 'game changing solutions providers' who like to 'leverage multi-channel synergies' or get 'cut-through from a holistic engagement strategy' in the hopes of publicising their 'seismic paradigm shifts going forward' have been clogging up workplaces and conversations for years but it seems to be getting a lot more 'traction'.

And it needs to stop. A quick trawl of press releases issued via Sourcewire.com today threw up everything from some awards for "game changers" to a "marketing platform [that] allows us to fully leverage best-in-breed solutions". There was a lot of leveraging going on.

The fog of jargon is no doubt created to mask insecurities or shortcomings. You only have to watch The Apprentice on BBC1 to see the use of jargon and competence are often inversely proportional.

It has provided rich-pickings for comedy writers:

"We've got a paradigm, we need to shift it".

But rather than laugh out of the room anybody who speaks like this, too many of us have nodded and joined in, perhaps for fear of exposing confusion, doubt or disloyalty. Or perhaps through laziness. It is not so much the Emperor's new clothes, more the Emperor's utter bollocks.

Effective communication needs to be about making complicated things sound simple. Not the reverse.

Jun 13, 2014

The Sun has roped Ed Miliband and David Cameron into a publicity stunt to advertise the newspaper ahead of the World Cup...

Miliband looks like he is being held hostage while Cameron works on his pretend reading pose.

The party leaders' agreeing to pose with the paper is part of a huge marketing campaign which has seen The Sun send free copies of the paper to 22 million households around England.

However, the free version of the paper was not delivered to Liverpool, where the paper is still widely boycotted due to its notorious coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, and postal workers in neighbouring parts of the North-West also refused to deliver it. Meanwhile, some people took to Twitter to say they planned to send it back 'freepost' to the address listed on The Sun's website or use it to line their cat's litter tray, while others left out notices stating they didn't want to receive it.

Jun 08, 2014

It's safe to say the latest blast from Paddy Power's controversial blunderbuss of viral publicity worked better than even the bookmaker could have hoped.

Images tweeted out from the Paddy Power Twitter account appeared to show an area of Amazon rainforest with the words 'C'mon England' shaved into the landscape by loggers. The message was signed 'PP'.

While many people familiar with the dark arts of image manipulation were willing to believe there was more to this than met the eye, there were a great many who believed the bookmaker had genuinely cut down trees in the name of publicity.

The reaction online was strong and very profane. Even actor Dominic Monaghan, who played Merry the Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings movies, waded in:

The Mirrorcovered the story and the Daily Mail described it as an "ecological catastrophe".

To be fair to all those people who fell for it, the images were incredibly convincing, especially once images taken from different angles emerged.

However, while Paddy Power is no stranger to courting controversy surely even they wouldn't really have gone to such lengths just to annoy people on Twitter and get some money-can't-buy publicity on the back of the outraged reaction.

And they didn't.

Paddy Power has published a full explanation of the technical wizardry behind the photos on its blog.

Just in case there are people who still don't believe them, Paddy Power has released a new image showing an entirely different message carved into the rainforest, with accompanying text claiming the stunt was to raise greater awareness of not only Paddy Power (though mainly Paddy Power presumably) but also the very real deforestation taking place in Brazil:

Apr 11, 2014

Loans company Wonga has ordered Twitter to remove an image posted by a user, citing copyright infringement. The company took issue with a picture which displayed the face of a character called Earl, who appears in the company's advertising, superimposed onto a Hogarth painting from the artist's Rake's Progress series, set in Fleet debtors' prison. The company also took issue with the use of its logo on the image.

Here's a version of the picture with the copyrighted content blanked out:

The original image shared on Twitter portrayed the character Earl, from Wonga's television adverts, in Fleet debtors' prison.

An extract from the take-down notice which cited the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The case marks the latest example of businesses and individuals getting tough on satirical Twitter accounts and content. From a legal standpoint, proving such instances of copyright infringement appears relatively straightforward though parody remains a grey area due to a potential defence of fair use. However, from a reputation management point of view, applying the letter of the law may not always be the most effective way to limit negative publicity.

In Wonga's case a great many people are now retweeting versions of the picture. One user's tweet has been retweeted over 1,600 times and it is looking as though Wonga's action may only increase the number of people who see the image.

Feb 28, 2014

Anybody worried that football isn't selling its soul quickly enough to the world of tangential commercial partnerships, will have been heartened by yesterday's news that Chelsea football club has signed a deal with 20th Century Fox and US cartoon show The Simpsons that involved Chelsea players turning up for a photo shoot with life-sized versions of themselves.

What are we doing? Chelsea players pose for the camera looking as confused as everybody else about what's going on. Belgian international Eden Hazard (far left) just about manages to contain his excitement while Fernando Torres wears the expression of a man who might be wondering if his cardboard cutout will take his place in the team. Photo: Chelseafc.com

The news was picked up by a number of media outlets, despite being accompanied by a press release that not only shed little light on why this deal has been done, but contained some of the most unconvincing quotes ever attributed to people in a press release:

"[Chelsea player, John] Terry, 33, said: "It's great to see myself and the other players as Simpsons characters."

Did he though? Really?

"The Simpsons was and still is my favourite show — and is now my kids' No 1 too. I can't wait to see what Bart and Homer will look like as Chelsea players."

Can't you John? I imagine they'll look like Bart and Homer but in Chelsea shirts. It's quite easy to picture really when you think about it. Just imagine two of the characters from your all time favourite show, wearing a football shirt you have worn every week for your entire footballing career.

"The club's chief executive Ron Gourlay said: "We are very pleased to announce such an exciting partnership. "The Simpsons is a hugely popular show and I hope Chelsea fans will enjoy seeing its main characters in our colours."

And by "seeing its main characters in our colours" he means, "spending money on overpriced merchandising which features its main characters in our colours".

Feb 21, 2014

There have been a number of stories this week that have showcased the good and the bad of brands large and small wrestling with social media.

First, there was the sorry tale of The Shed café in Bath who took to Facebook to insult a woman who had posted a comment about customers allegedly breathing all over the cake display, calling her a "stupid woman" and branding her feedback "bollocks". The charmer.

Inevitably, the row escalated and the story was picked up by local and national media and the café saw its name and reputation dragged through the mud, with almost all of the headlines drawing attention to the fact the woman's initial comments, whether "bollocks" or not, had been about hygeine.

It is incredible that they didn't realise how things might snowball from those initial rude comments and utterly jaw-dropping that they thought igniting a dispute about hygeine might be a good thing to do on social media.

Then of course there was Mastercard whose social media strategy for the Brit Awards this week revealed some weapons-grade stupidity.

Priceless: Just some of the tweets which got Mastercard trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.

It showed contempt not only for authenticity, common sense and transparency – three essential pillars of social media - but also for the journalists concerned, because believe it or not it could have been so much worse.

Did the people behind this clumsy strategy not consider what would have happened if their invited journalists HAD agreed to send the tweets? What did they think would happen when people spotted a host of identical tweets, so obviously posted to please Mastercard, travelling through their Twitter feed?

Twitter users would have been very quick to spot any coincidence of similar tweets and the journalists sending them would have been left open to ridicule, with their reputations and those of their publications called into question.

The requests made on behalf of Mastercard were ridiculous on so many levels:

The assumption that any journalist worth knowing would play ball

The notion that a ticket to the Brits could ever be worth risking reputations for

The fact they didn't realise how offensive the request was to journalists and how dismissive it was of their likely ethical objections

The fact they didn't predict how quickly this approach would backfire

The belief that such shameless tweets would have had any value even if they had appeared

The fact that despite requesting journalists send tweets promoting Mastercard "in return for" tickets, there was no apparent suggestion the journalists should play by the rules which govern promotional tweets and state clearly that such an agreement was in place.

But it wasn't all bad this week. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power used the Brits to school Mastercard in how to inspire a positive, viral reaction on social media. Their approach was simple: give people something to tweet about, and while you're at it make sure it is solid gold genius.

Paddy Power took advantage of the fondness of French popsters Daft Punk for wearing fancy helmets to send a couple of impersonators onto the red carpet in disguise, before they whipped off their trousers to reveal Paddy Power-branded lucky pants.

A tweet from The Media Blog on Wednesday night.

At first some Twitter users seemed confused:

But pretty soon the stunt had gone everywhere, across Twitter and onto mainstream media from OK! to Heat and the Mail Online. Popular Tweeters @ThePoke declared it "prank of the week" to their 122,000 followers and even @DaftPunkNews shared it with more than 90,000 followers. @PRWeekNews also showed Paddy some love and at no point did the Irish bookmaker have to clumsily incentivise people to tweet about it or call anybody names.

Chris Atkins who made that Channel 4 documentary told the Media Blog that at least Thornton was honest about her tweet being paid for - by using the #ad hashtag - and said the reaction of her followers showed why some other celebrities try to keep their commercial relationships hidden.

Atkins said:

"When we were secretly filming Dynasty Media, who brokered celebrity promotional tweets, they told us many celebs didn't want to be seen to plug products on Twitter as they'd get laughed at for being seen to sell out. The reaction to the Thornton tweets show this is very much the case. But a lot of celebs can't resist the quick cash that endorsement tweets offer, which is why many mislead their fans and dress plugs up as personal opinion, in breach of ASA rules.

"There are an awful lot of dodgy tweets still doing the rounds, though I've noticed the "#ad" appearing an awful lot more since our Dispatches went out."

Thornton's tweet certainly complied with ASA guidelines and only she will know whether the money she received was worth annoying some of her followers and being associated with such a tactic.

But while Thornton waits for the cheque to clear, Twitter will inevitably have some fun:

Sep 06, 2012

Oh Nokia, what have you done? If you're going to release a video claiming to show how good the camera on your new phone is make sure the people demonstrating it don't cycle past any windows which clearly show the reflection of a professional cameraman doing the filming out of a van on a video camera. Major hat tip to The Verge on this one:

Jul 27, 2012

You can spend as much as you like on being an official Olympic sponsor but there is no substitute for a creative idea and Specsavers has stolen the show with this lightning quick response to the Olympic flag mix up. The ad has already appeared in this morning's papers:

Jul 25, 2012

Bottle shop Oddbins has added its name to the list of businesses findings creative ways to cash-in on not being able to cash-in on the Olympics.

The company has announced a cheeky 30% discount scheme for Pepsi-drinking, Nike-wearing, KFC-eating, iPhone-using, Mastercard-toting, Vauxhall-driving, British Gas-buying drinkers (which may not be that many people... but let's not worry about that).

The company has deliberately picked the closest competitors of all the major Olympic sponsors to highlight what it is calling LOCOG's iniquitous "cabal".

Jul 19, 2012

One enterprising website called ThatBigEventInLondon.co.uk seems to think it has found a way around the strict commercial guidelines of an unnamed Big Event in London and is offering a range of 'reality check souvenir bags'...

If you buy all three it will set you back £45, which is just £5 more than a London 2012 £5 coin. Go figure.

May 30, 2012

To mark its 50th anniversary, The Advertising Standards Authority has released a list of the most complained about adverts of all time. The list speaks volumes about gentle British sensibilities - not least because the most offensive advert of all time, based on number of complaints received, was guilty of nothing more than depicting people singing with their mouths full. Shocking stuff, I'm sure you'll agree:

May 18, 2012

Add this to the list of adverts vandalised in a creative, pointed fashion: a street artist in Hamburg has taken it upon themselves to start adding Photoshop toolboxes to adverts which carry obviously manipulated images:

Apr 23, 2012

If you look carefully you might just spot a little bit of advertising from Sky (39 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) around The Guardian's double page spread on Murdoch's entry in the Leveson fray this week (hat tip Scott Bryan):

Is this a defensive measure by Sky - an undaunted attempt to capitalise on one of the week's big media stories or a cheeky attempt to drown out potentially negative coverage? Or is it simply unfortunate sheduling?

Feb 23, 2012

It seems it has always been the case that attempts to stop the public seeing something only ever increases the publicity generated. Just ask Ryan Giggs - named this week as the fooballer behind a high court injunction, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

Channel 4 Dispatches also received a welcome boost to its likely viewing figures this week after ticket resale site Viagogo failed in its attempts to stop the channel airing the investigation into its business practices. Cue a great piece of publicity on the Guardian's website, teeing the programme up nicely just hours before it aired.

But it works both ways and there are also those businesses and individuals who appear to court the publicity which can result from regulatory or public criticism.

The company no doubt planned for a scenario where the advert got the all clear but Paddy Power also knows from experience that the closer it gets to the fine line between what's allowed and what isn't there will be benefits whatever happens.

Get banned and the company gets the kind of coverage that money literally cannot buy - while having to write off an advert that looked a fairly inexpensive affair. Don't get banned and it just gets the ad slots it's paid for while stirring controversy with every airing.

Paddy Power may not lose much sleep about the people his advert has angered. Adverts based on jokes about blind men mistaking a cat for a football or punters getting confused about transgender people are almost certainly not meant to appeal to all.

Gambling is one of the most competitive industries in the UK and in the run up to horse racing's big festivals of Cheltenham and Aintree, there will be plenty who think a bookmaker who is famous for making injudicious decisions sounds like a bookmaker worth knowing.

Another fiercely competitive industry is the airline business and that too has given rise to a company who knows the value of marketing controversy.

Ryanair this month earned saturation media coverage when adverts featuring stewardesses in their underwear were banned and branded sexist.

From news bulletins on BBC Radio to a big splash (featuring the pictures of course) in the Daily Mail, this controversy reached an audience that Ryanair's own advertising budget could only dream of, because such tactics achieve what brands have always wanted to do - climb out of the ad space around the story and become the story themselves.

And the engineered 'ban' as a PR stunt certainly appears to be spreading by the day.

Hollywood and the showbiz media are abuzz with news that Sacha Baron Cohen (remember him?) may or may not have been banned from the Oscars over fears he'll turn up in character as The Dictator - a character in his latest movie.

I confess I didn't even know he had a new film out until I read about this apparent ban. I wonder who tipped everybody off.

Jan 29, 2012

This week saw the Daily Mail's website claim top spot among the world's newspapers. Critics may call it a victory for quantity over quality, but top spot is top spot. And what does the Mail attribute this success to?

Drawing upon the strengths of the Daily Mail newspaper...MailOnline has re-invented popular journalism for the digital era.

Now this is where the Mail is being far too modest. The runaway success of the website owes very little to piggy-backing on "the strengths of the newspaper".

The newspaper's success is based on targeting a very specific audience. It writes for the predominantly white, middle-aged, middle class of middle England, pushing a news agenda intended to create, then exploit fears about health scares, hoodies, liberals and the impact of multiculturalism. The paper's parochialism is the reason it is successful. It is also the reason it is so loathed.

At the last count, the Daily Mail's parish was around 1.9 million strong.That's a lot of readers but it goes no way towards explaining the current success of the Mail's website. Not least because the MailOnline has taken a completely different approach to finding readers.

It set about attracting readers by following the agenda of others, rather than trying to set its own. It is dedicated to serving content people were already searching for online. As such, much of the success of the Daily Mail website is the result of a focus on US reality TV, celebrity, pop music and naked flesh. Lots and lots of naked flesh:

Of course the newspaper content does make it onto the website but clearly the focus for growth is not on the paper's traditional constituency or content. After all, how many readers of the Daily Mail newspaper know or care who Kim Kardashian is? Yet alongside Lady Gaga and Rihanna, Kardashian is an ever-present on the Daily Mail website.

And who is Snooki? I doubt she is the talk of the town among the Chipping Norton Rotarians yet she is a subject of some fascination for the Daily Mail's website team.

Bikini photos

The real engine room of the Mail's online success is the picture desk. If somebody famous is spotted in public wearing a revealing dress or a bikini the pictures will be on the Daily Mail's website the next day.

If a model takes part in a shoot for a new line of lingerie or poses for a glossy magazine, the Mail will run the pics. If a celebrity falls out of a dress or reveals a little too much when stepping out of a car, a full upskirt or down cleavage record of the event will be available in the right hand column of the Mail's website:

How did we cope before the Daily Mail website began aggregating every bikini photo ever taken of Kim Kardashian?

The Daily Mail's modesty no doubt prevents it from saying it has become the go-to online destination for pictures of famous ladies in tight dresses, bikinis and underwear, but it has aggressively and successfully cornered that market by flooding its website with content promising Google users that is exactly what they'll find.

There is no denying the Mail's orchestrated success in courting pure online numbers and although it is a model which advertisers are less excited about now than they were in the dot-com boom of the late nineties, the Mail is clearly confident this remains a recipe for success.

Much of the web-only content is base commodity, aimed at drawing in any traffic it can, though the focus is clearly on the US. The majority of the photos are bought from picture agencies and the lion's share of the web-only copy is cut and pasted from US wire services. In fact, the prolific 'Daily Mail Reporter' is now cutting and pasting so much US wire copy - irrespective of how trite the news appears -they no longer bother trying to keep pace with changing US words such as 'sidewalk' or 'cell phone' to the English equivalents.

This may seem a small point, but for a newspaper to disregard its style guide - as crucial a part of its identity as the masthead - in pursuit of traffic is clear evidence its website and paper are being run as very different properties:

"This news story is about this interesting..."

None of these observations are intended as a criticism of the Daily Mail. It has set out to sell cheap commodity content based on titillation and US celebrities in various states of undress and it does it to great success. But the Mail really is being unnecessarily modest - or deliberately disingenuous - when it claims the runaway success of its website is an extension of its success in print. The two could hardly be more different and whatever it says, the Mail clearly wouldn't have it any other way.

Footballer Rio Ferdinand, boxer Amir Khan, reality TV star Jordan, X Factor contestant Cher Lloyd and cricketing legend Sir Ian Botham all took payment in return for letting Snickers advertise to their followers. But the ASA and the Office of Fair Trading appear to have taken issue with the fact the series of Tweets weren't immediately flagged as adverts.

Et tu Beefy? Knight of the realm Botham (bottom left) added his name to the list of celebrities tweeting for Snickers.

Whatever action the ASA sees fit to take, if any, the stunt may well go down as one of the crassest attempts to date to exploit the popularity of those celebrities willing to hawk their Twitter followers to big brands.

Out of the four, Cher Lloyd can probably be forgiven for trying to make hay while the fleeting sun of X Factor celebrity shines but as one follower asked of Ferdinand: